An Ontology for Vulnerability Lifecycle

System vulnerability is a major cause of failures in complex systems. Relevancy analysis and ranking of vulnerability are important for system administrative work. Our research roadmap is to define a framework for prioritizing vulnerabilities based on relevancy gleaned on online information. In order to do that a systematic representation of knowledge is needed. In this paper, the relationship between lifecycle and characteristic of vulnerability-related information are defined and used in building the Vulnerability Lifecycle Ontology (VLO). VLO is further enriched by standardized naming scheme, vulnerability database, taxonomy, and related documents from the Internet. VLO will be used as the knowledge base in the vulnerability relevancy framework.